Security Risk Analysis and Evaluation of Integrating Customer Energy Management Systems into Smart Distribution Grids

The subject addressed by this paper is the analysis and evaluation of different architectural concepts for securely integrating Customer Energy Management Systems into smart distribution grids. Nowadays approaches target the active integration of Distributed Energy Resources, Demand Side Management and Automated Meter Reading into the households in order to enable a manageable and controllable smart distribution grid. Therefore a comprehensive, secure and reliable communication network architecture, reaching down to the customers' premises equipment, needs to be deployed. These networks are usually located at public domains and are connected to the critical infrastructure of the Smart Grid control network. Together with this it represents potential points of failures and possible risks, including malicious attacks and system faults, for the overall system architecture. To reduce the risks associated with connecting the households to the comprehensive monitoring and control architecture, a risk analysis of the multiple communication network architectures is performed. Through this analysis the impact of different access network strategies on security can be assessed to select the most appropriate one, to ensure a reliable operation of the mission-critical Smart Grid communication network infrastructures.